NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 05: Airtime Co-founder and Executive Chairman Sean Parker demoing Airtime Live during the Airtime Launch Press Conference at Milk Studios on June 5, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Airtime)

Two of technology's biggest pop stars, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, Tuesday brought their high-wattage celebrity to the latest arena of online networking - social discovery.

In a star-studded event in New York, the founders of Napster unveiled a Facebook video application called Airtime, which joins a growing ecosystem of services aiming to define the next level of social networking.

In the past year, the category has come to broadly encompass ways to use Facebook or other social-networking services to serendipitously learn about new music, TV shows, food, concerts or news stories.

It's about "helping you discover what you're going to do next," whether it's your next meal, your next outfit or your next job, said Julie Crabill, the organizer of Glimpse, a first-ever social-discovery conference that takes place Wednesday in San Francisco.

While social networking - especially on Facebook - creates a well-defined circle of friends and acquaintances, social-discovery companies are trying to bring back the spontaneity of the unknown that was more prevalent in the days of online bulletin boards and Internet Relay Chats.

Users then were forced to constantly explore and meet new people online, said Greg Tseng, chief executive officer of San Francisco social-discovery network Tagged Inc.

"Back in the old days of the Internet, there weren't enough people online so you couldn't connect with your friends," said Tseng, whose company gave up trying to compete solely as a social network with Facebook in 2007 to focus on being a network to discover new friends.

Connecting strangers

Parker and Fanning randomly met in an online chat room 15 years ago before going on to create Napster, the Bay Area company that disrupted the music industry. Parker went on to be a founding president of Facebook, although moviegoers might think of his character played by Justin Timberlake in "The Social Network."

At a star-studded event in New York on Tuesday, Airtime introduced a video chat service that works on Facebook. The free service is billed as the easiest way for Facebook friends to set up video chats, although on that front, Airtime also competes with services like Skype and ooVoo.

But Airtime, with headquarters in San Francisco, is also designed to branch beyond the standard Facebook friends network to set up video discussions between strangers who share a common interest or location.

Airtime Chief Operating Officer Michael Polansky said the service brings back "more of a sense of exploration."

"There's a whole wide world of people out there you don't know who maybe you should," Polansky said. "You can have meaningful experiences around interest and content, conversations about a band you like or a movie you just watched. That is a very valuable piece of discovery."

Promise and privacy

Polansky said the 30-employee firm is just starting to exploring various ways to make money from social video discovery, such as advertising or becoming a platform for the paid distribution of content.

Still, advertisers and marketers are already excited with the data social networks generate about the likes and habits of members, and the ability to tailor a brand's message to a specific interest group could be even more valuable.

And that raises privacy questions that need to be answered, said Crabill, chief executive officer of Inner Circle Labs, the marketing and communications strategy firm behind Glimpse: the Social Discovery Conference, which will be held at the Marriott Union Square.

"Where are the privacy lines, how far is too far, how much do I want you to know?" she said. "Where does each individual draw the line and where does the market as a whole draw the line?"

But Damien Patton, chief executive officer and founder of Redwood City social-discovery app maker Banjo, notes that social sharing is already a mainstream activity.

If people didn't want to tweet or post their photos, "they wouldn't even be on a social network," Patton said. "They'd just keep a diary under their bed."

Evolution of 'friend'

One measure of that is Banjo's app, which synthesizes the social networking activities across popular services like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Foursquare. In just 10 months, Banjo has attracted 1.5 million users. And Patton is part of a panel of "rising stars" featured at Wednesday's conference.

Tseng of Tagged, which now has 300 million registered members after its acquisition last year of early social-networking pioneer Hi5, said some people may question why they need more friends when they can't keep up with the ones they have.

Indeed, according to one theory, 150 is the maximum number of friends any person can effectively handle.

But Tseng said friends, like social networks, tend to evolve over time.

"Social discovery to me is discovering new people to form new relationships, and that is core to being human," he said. "On Tagged and other social-discovery services, we're trying to introduce you to the next 150."